If you make technology stack decisions based on your feelings rather than what the product actually does, then you shouldn't be employed as a decision-maker.
Feelings become reality. People care about what things are called. You just don't care because it doesn't bother you. But if it was a topic you were sensitive about or something you feel is inappropriate, you would feel otherwise. Everyone has their limits of what is going too far. It's almost as if we live in a society with people from different backgrounds. What this really hits on is subjective relativism, and that's dangerous for an entire society to operate on. Maybe Cockroach isn't that bad, maybe it grosses some people out. Fine, not that big of a deal here. What if it was called "BondageDB"?
My point was that the job of a technology decision-maker is to make decisions on the actual technical merits of various options, the costs and tradeoffs thereof.
If you are in that role, and you permit the name of a vendor to trump the actual merits of the vendor's product, you should never have been trusted with decision-making authority in the first place, and any competitors who don't harbor your particular emotional hangups will get the better of you, and you won't be long for your position anyway.
Cockroach Labs is not selling to the end-consumer. They're selling to people whose job it is to behave like Vulcans. In this particular market, it doesn't matter what the name is.
